Queuing Over Ever-Changing Communication Scenarios in Tactical Networks

IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 21, pp. 291–305

Abstract

This paper introduces a hierarchy of queues complementing each other to handle ever-changing communication scenarios in tactical networks. The first queue stores the QoS-constrained messages from command and control systems. These messages are fragmented into IP packets, which are stored in a queue of packets (second) to be sent to the radio buffer (third), which is a queue with limited space therefore, open to overflow. We start with the hypothesis that these three queues can handle ever-changing user(s) data flows (problem$A$) through ever-changing network conditions (problem$B$) using cross-layer information exchange, such as buffer occupancy, data rate, queue size and latency (problem$A|B$). We introduce two stochastic models to create sequences of QoS-constrained messages ($A$) and to create ever-changing network conditions ($B$). In sequence, we sketch a control loop to shape$A$to$B\;$to test our hypothesis using model$A|B$, which defines enforcement points at the incoming/outgoing chains of the system together with a control plane. Then, we discuss experimental results in a network with VHF radios using data flows that overflows the radio buffer over ever-changing data rate patterns. We discuss quantitative results showing the performance and limitations of our solutions for problems$A$,$B$, and$A|B$.

Authors 4

1. Roberto Rigolin F. Lopes

   Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics

   Affiliation as printed

   Communications Systems Department, Fraunhofer FKIE, Bonn, Germany

2. Pooja Hanavadi Balaraju Aachen Communication and Distributed Systems Institute

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Communication and Distributed Systems Institute, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

3. Paulo H. L. Rettore

   Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics

   Affiliation as printed

   Communications Systems Department, Fraunhofer FKIE, Bonn, Germany

4. Peter Sevenich

   Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics

   Affiliation as printed

   Communications Systems Department, Fraunhofer FKIE, Bonn, Germany